He, hopelessly wretched, walked on with no boots , no home.
Fate knocked him down. Shunned by people around.
Assaulted, body and mind, with bleeding knuckles and a broken nail-tip, but he did not relax his grip.
A pen,his only savior, clutched in one hand. He walked on, destined to make it grand.
Writing Challenge:http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/writing-challenge-fifty/
Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis
Times change us and we change in them. Not until my ‘being’ went through a tumultuous journey had I understood that time is an active participant in my life. The quality waxes and wanes in coherence with my thoughts. It elongates and contracts against my wishes. It transforms me in a way I never foresee and wouldn’t want to. Transmutation continues every second. And, I see time molding me into something new every moment. I revel and I accept.
Time and being are not separate from each other. Not in the sense of existence in space but in thoughts(being). State of mind and mood it generates, or simply the ‘being’ is intertwined with the time line I live in. It seems to me like my existence is an endless chain connected by the moments I remember. But the memories are subjective. The new person I am always evolving in has its own perspective about my memories. I have seen it transform the memories thanks to the awareness I forced by habit.So, I tend to lose the links in between only to replace them with new ones. I am left with a renewed ‘being’, present and past, and the enforcer,time.
Time, thus is not a mere synchronization of two events for me. It can be sensed in the way I go forward in my life.
The physicality of time is apparent in my ‘being’.
In India you don’t have to seek for an adventure, adventure seeks you. You just need to STEP OUT. The colors and the moods of Indian people are so varied in nature that ‘something’ is always bound to happen. It is the most fitting stage with the greatest number of misfits. Stories, delightful as well as horrifying, await for you to be a part. One waited for me for quite a long time.
I was planning to go home for last few weeks but something always came up. And, by ‘came up’ I mean I was too lazy to drag my ass out of my apartment. Add to it the fact that it is on eleventh floor. Once you spend an eternity in a boring lift, with its squeaking pulleys, to come up you hardly have the energy to go back down. So here I was, determined to go home that weekend. I gave myself no room for excuses and applied for short leave. I finished my work early and stacked all the files in my drawer neatly. I added a few sticky notes on my desktop about things I have to get back at, on Monday. Little did I know, I ain’t coming back soon.
I was feeling kind of neat and managed after all the tidying up. I didn’t foresee that I was working in one of those ‘firms on the outskirts of the city with lush green environment to keep you invigorated’. This sounded nice back when I first looked at the advertisement. With layers of dust on my face waiting for a ride home,not so much. Not at all, actually. I wanted to go back in and hurl a bunch a A4 sheets on my boss’s face. May be some around me also. And then tell him that I was resigning and my resignation letter was sitting in his mailbox. Oh! I certainly don’t want to itch that scratch. Better get back to the road.
The deafening honk rocked me out of the reverie. The first thing that squirmed up in my mind as soon as I glanced at the driver was ; Ain’t I lucky, bitches? The blossomed, and beautifully so, Niki. She works in a different department. My bad luck. The fissure of overwhelming feelings stuttered back into my pants the moment I saw her boyfriend sitting beside her. It was a cream(Really?) colored Esteem. The front windshield had a crack in the corner which spread like a lightening. She lurched her neck out and asked if I needed a ride to the city.
Hell ya.
Beer cans and Lays’ wrapers lied around on back seat of the car. The guy frowned at her for being so messy. She turned and cornered everything in one quick sweep of her arm. She chuckled the whole thing off and the car heaved forward. I tried hard not to look at the nape of her neck. I didn’t want to reach home with a black eye. I asked her about the windshield. She said it cracked because of heat and chortled again. Her boyfriend let out a heavy sigh.After necessary ‘blah blah’ we all slid down in our own thoughts.
The dusty gilded sun rays slanted through the trees. My eyes spanned the fields along the road and my mind wandered until the beats of light and shadow slowly lulled me to sleep. Not more than ten minutes had past when the giggling sounds woke me up. She asked me about my family and stuff. I reciprocated the useless questionnaire. The tollway was up and the car didn’t seem to slow down. My heart throbbed hard, beating about in my chest as if trying to jump out of the car. To be continued….
The silence that comes from books and surrounds us is a silence full of sound.
-Rodrigo Fresan
What exactly is love?
A word assigned to an assortment of feelings that makes you feel good about a person. A series of positive responses from your mind for someone’s actions or someone’s physical appearance.
Or
Pure desire in disguise.
Or
For hopeless romantics, it is something that you shouldn’t even try to explain. You should give up all hopes to even vaguely define love. It is always “so much more”.
What,What did you say?Are you kidding me?
I wince and stop listening to people who pick up the last definition. And, why shouldn’t I? If they have a right to have an opinion , I have a right not to beat my eardrums with that shit. Blood boils, but I remain silent. You don’t want to argue with these people. They are impossible. Longer you argue funnier it gets. And, it is not something that makes you laugh genuinely. It produces a mere affectation. A strange laugh that irks you and the person you are talking to. And, you start to feel pity for them. If it is so special, why haven’t I seen even a single case of unconditional love? It is always driven by some sort of opportunity. I don’t see misfits in love. Even if there are some misled cases, they’ll eventually turn up against each other. Also, people speak in wild puffery nowadays. They use phrases like everlasting love and a soul mate for everyone. They smell of absurdity.
“She is the one and no one else suits me”, someone said to me. Like he has sampled all the girls on this earth. I say this because I have seen the naked truth of love. It’s simple, and I hope people get their senses back. S/he is gonna !!!! it up bad. I need to keep my aura clean, so I should not talk about these “beautiful, godly and magical” things. Just be with someone until you feel happy around them and be honest with your feelings. Period.
Do I really need someone to smack me in the head? Do I need circumstance to force me to walk the line? This situation and these emotions are not unprecedented. People fight and get crushed. Money remains standing above all. Money-God is crafty and it is really hard to stay out of that whole business. Even ‘Gordon Comstock’ gave up the fight. Everyone does. They settle with the Money-God and his minions. They give in. Society,religion and above all money rule.With this realization, I sink down in ennui and start feeling helpless. Everything seems irrelevant and futile. I turn inwards and my mind wanders around. My eyes flutter and the stack of books in the corner of my room catches my attention. I always tend to forget that I have a decent outlet after all. I pounce on my savior. I try to pull out this book, The sense of an Ending,from the bottom of the pile. A hardcover. Dusty on sides. I shake off the dust and open the book. The smell of pages, oxidized over time, takes over me. I feel spell-bound. I take out all the books I love. An old copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. Another hardcover by Orhan Pamuk. A dogeared copy of A Train to Pakistan. All the George Orwell’s works. I spread them all on my bed.I open them one by one and get high on aroma of the pages like a junky on meth.I forget about the dreadful world out there. I feel sanguine again. The clouds in my mind wade off. Everything is sunshine and roses.May be I don’t have to stand out and keep on the fight!! Worthless,it is. If I have no where to go out I can always turn inwards. I can sit here in my room with books around. I can let the paper engulf me. I can let it take me in its stride. I pore through books looking for the resonating paragraphs.
Chair,bed,chair,bed,balcony,chair,bed. Sometimes my spine erected and sometimes supine. Everywhere and through time. Prose and rhyme. Calm. Happy. I am fine.
“Plumes of smoke from Chuhlas , wretched shanties and clouds of dust rising up beastly behind the hordes of kids running towards me bring a feeling of dread everyday I reach my classroom. It depresses me to think of their future. The expected feeling of joy or much practiced ‘pity’ eludes me instead a numbing emotion overtakes.
The latch of the door gives out a piercing cry when I try to open it. The musty room and snot-smeared faces of children obviously disgust me. Though the need to explain the importance of reason to these minors far exceeds anything else. An hour and a half of toiling along with these kids, uttering repetitively ‘CAT mane BILLI (Or bilai in their dialect)’ and getting some comforting results out finally takes away any qualms I might have had.
I ask Zunaidey if she wants to read stories and her face lights up brightly. Mumtaz works arduously and Sabiran laughs incessantly. Azadul sweeps me off my feet with his beautiful memory and this another toddler says Namaste with folded hands. Hope springs out of that rubble. Optimism takes over me and I go home with a smile.”
Reason is what it feeds on,
trying to decipher the underlying codes ;
A fraction implores to stop,
but the insane one explodes…..
The rattle of hooves 